


Stochastic Convergence

by seinmit



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland)
Genre: Cellular Biology, F/M, Metaphysics, POV Experimental, Philosophy, Post-Break Up, Post-Canon, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23844214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/pseuds/seinmit
Summary: "Stochastic convergence" formalizes the idea that a sequence of essentially random or unpredictable events can sometimes be expected to settle into a pattern. The pattern may for instance be• Convergence in the classical sense to a fixed value, perhaps itself coming from a random event• An increasing similarity of outcomes to what a purely deterministic function would produce• An increasing preference towards a certain outcome• An increasing "aversion" against straying far away from a certain outcome• That the probability distribution describing the next outcome may grow increasingly similar to a certain distribution
Relationships: Kane/Lena (Annihilation)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18
Collections: What Fen Do (Instead of Going Outside)





	Stochastic Convergence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts).



> Summary ripped off from Wikipedia!

The mind reaches for metaphor. That’s just what a mind does. Lena remembers the shimmer and thinks: oil spill on a puddle in a gas station, colored cling-film on a slice of banana bread at a school bake sale, nail polish dripping from the brush, falling on a table. A thumb wipes it away, but it leaves particulate. 

She wonders if it means something, the mundanity of the connections her mind makes. They’re all very small things, human things. Before she even walked into the tree line, she could have turned to Anya or Cass and said, you know what it reminds me of? And they would have known. 

"You’d never do that," Kane says. 

He is sitting in the corner, staring at his hands. The patterns on his fingertips aren’t moving and he doesn’t know why he expects them to—they never had before, not even before the ashes. 

"Not with those metaphors," he says. "Maybe the gas station, but—" 

She doesn’t let her face change. She feels his sigh in her chest, but she can’t respond to that either. She’s being interrogated again, in a more genteel way.

"How are you feeling?" the doctor says. She’s a psychiatrist—blond, like Ventress. She’s a smoker. Maybe Lena can smell it. 

Kane chuckles without making a sound. 

"Fine," Lena says, in the oldest reflex. She remembers herself and continues speaking. "Well."

She struggles to know where to take the self-correction. She can hear old patterns in her own voice, the careful way she’d shift between self-deprecation and assertion, how she managed to seem professional but not too icy. 

The psychiatrist relaxes to see Lena struggle for words. It’s disconcerting, for someone in Lena’s position to be self-possessed. She hates to think the word "alien" but it’s hard to avoid, with Lena looking back at her with calm, clear eyes. 

"It’s been a strange transition," Lena says. She wants to tell the psychiatrist that she’s always been like this. That it should be far more disconcerting to see her break down, because that’s just not something Lena does. Not in Afghanistan, not in grad school, not in the end of her marriage. 

"I was in the military," Lena says. The psychiatrist should know that; she does know that. She’s not military. Lena has many different doctors, now, all with different attitudes. This one is civilian. 

"Why do you say that?" the doctor says. 

If she’d been military, she'd know. She’s too old, anyway. She never wanted to. When she was young enough, she hadn’t considered it. 

"Since you’ve gotten back, things have started making a lot more sense," Kane says. "I hadn’t even realized, before." 

"In organizations like the military, you’re defined by your job," Lena says. "People address you by rank more than name. And if they use your name, it’s your last name—and that’s like a title, isn’t it? It’s who you belong to. They addressed me with my maiden name, and then I got married and I used Kane’s. That makes it really clear it is a title." 

The psychiatrist's pen scratches on the paper. The small ball rolls within the body of the pen, coating itself in the mixture of oxidized ferrous ferrocyanide salts, phthalocyanine, oleic acid, alkyl alkanolamide, and phenoxyethanol. The fibers of the paper are mildly displaced by the pressure of the metal and the dye seeps into them, the surfectant ensuring that the capillary motion is smooth. The molecules are bulbous, meaningless—the molecular orbital diagram sharpens over the reality of matter. She can can see the angles. 

Prussian blue. She knows it is Prussian blue. Inorganic, which is strange, and she doesn’t know anything about the names of colors—

Kane does. Kane took an art class, in between his deployments, while she was in grad school. She had been too busy to spend much time with him and she’d suggested it, feeling the need to keep him occupied. 

He enjoyed it. He didn't think she was responsible for entertaining him, but she knew he was lying. She was the one who kept track of their lives—plugging them into plans their friends made, bringing them to new restaurants, catching a play on opening weekend. Enjoying all the things that a person could do when they were part of a society and not a unit. 

"Do you resent being known by a title?" the psychiatrist asks. 

Lena breathes deep through her nose, tries to ground herself in the constraints of her skin—the psychiatrist is a smoker. She knew that. There are mutagens and carcinogens embedded in all the absorbent material of her clothing—the DNA damage from the residue is hard to extract from the direct battering of smoke the woman takes in, but there’s _N_ -nitrosamines tickling her epidermis. A cell divides and the replication swerves, the DNA failing to transcribe itself accurately. The cell dies. Another—this time, when the transcription goes in new directions, the cell lives. The cell is different, but in the mundane way all tumors are different—they grow, but form ugly, undifferentiated masses. They’re excess without life. 

"Lena?" 

"Sorry," she says. "Could you repeat the question?" 

"She asked if you resented being married to me," Kane says. "Or him." 

"Resentment isn’t the right concept," Lena says. "I was trying to say—I’m a person, but I’m also an instance of a pattern. There’s a type of thing that is a cellular biologists, and I’m one of that type. There’s a type of thing that’s an academic. A type for military. A type for wife."

"That’s not where you were going with this before," Kane says. "You got distracted by the mitosis—I’ve watched you do that any number of times, but now I get it." 

"It’s hard to know what I'm supposed to consider when you ask me how I’m doing. How am I as a wife? How am I as a professor? How am I as a human? It’s a lot of questions, all wrapped up in that." 

The pen—the pen moves over paper. It’s strange, the overlays. Things exist up and down the scale of measurement and they don’t really exist at all. A person is a collection of organs is a collection of cells is a collection of atoms is a collection of particles is a collection of quarks is a collection of—she feels the truth of what’s underneath, but the words aren’t there, neither she nor Kane know them and the meager reach on the psychiatrist is just at the level of her mind, the easiest thing for their originally-human grasp.

Each level is truth and missing entirely, none of them are right but all of them, but it cannot exist at once. 

She clenches her hands, releases them—she feels the kinetic force of her muscles moving, the way a body feels from the inside; she feels the way her husband would see that gesture and think, uh oh she’s pissed; she feels the myosin molecules pulling actin filaments, their entire selves changing—but a cell doesn’t have a self, and Lena feels like the only reason she’s retaining even the illusion of one is that the mediated space between her and Kane creates them both, subjects becoming subjects by contrast. 

"What feels most relevent to you? Out of your identities, which one would you like to tell me about first?" 

"They aren’t identities, that's not what I meant—an instance isn’t an identity." 

Identity is 1=1, it is a thing in itself, just itself. But there are infinite 1s (an apple tossed to a child, just one—a kiss before you go—do you take this ( _one_ ) man—) and each one is an instance of one/kiss/apple/man, and it never is just itself. Up and down, apple to cells to molecules, and then—organs to human to Kane to man to husband to love to—

"You should fall in love with a philospher next," Kane says. "I don’t think I’m helping you any here." 

"I don’t think I love my husband anymore," Lena says. 

The psychiatrist represses her satisfaction—that’s the sort of thing she wants to hear, and there’s some relief for Lena that she can still manage viciousness. It seems like a thing that takes intention, wanting to hurt someone, and she’s not sure she has enough of a self to form a coherent will, to create a reason and then do it. 

"You didn’t need a reason to fuck around on me before, sweetheart. And a fucking economist—useless. The whole point is that the model is separate from the world."

All models are. That's what it means to be a model. 

"How do you feel about that? Having lost your love for your husband?"

She doesn’t have an answer—the desire to hurt felt like vestigial, disconnected from any sense of self or past. She twitched and wanted to kick him like he tapped her knee with one of those old-timey medical hammers.

"The thing that cracks me up is that you know the reason I got better? It’s not because you defeated the shimmer."

"I don’t know." 

"It’s because you finally assimilated. Without you, I didn’t have any idea who I was—but there you are, with all those memories, and your memories are such a stark fucking contrast to mine—I can sketch out Kane in the angles of our tangents." 

"I feel like when I'm with him, I don’t have a self. I’m wife. Mrs." 

He’s husband, now, at least; she collapsed into each of her component strata and in so differentiating, drew parts of him out. 

"What would it mean for you to have a self? What do you imagine that being?"

Alone.


End file.
